IF HILLARY SHOULD'VE KNOWN THE IRAQ WAR WAS "BALONEY," WHY DIDN'T DOWD'S DEAD FRIEND KNOW?

Maureen Dowd's latest column is being widely mocked -- at sites ranging from Twitchy to the Tumblr blog Is Maureen Dowd High Right Now? -- for a whiplash-inducing segue that leads from Robin Williams to Hillary Clinton, via the Iraq War:

... In 1993, when he played a prim British nanny in "Mrs. Doubtfire," I went to interview [Robin Williams] at his Pacific Heights house....

As our interview ended, I was telling him about my friend Michael Kelly's idea for a 1-900 number, not one to call Asian beauties or Swedish babes, but where you'd have an amorous chat with a repressed Irish woman. Williams delightedly riffed on the caricature, playing the role of an older Irish woman answering the sex line in a brusque brogue, ordering a horny caller to go to the devil with his impure thoughts and disgusting desire.

I couldn't wait to play the tape for Kelly, who doubled over in laughter.

So when I think of Williams, I think of Kelly. And when I think of Kelly, I think of Hillary, because Michael was the first American reporter to die in the Iraq invasion, and Hillary Clinton was one of the 29 Democratic senators who voted to authorize that baloney war.

The woman who always does her homework, the woman who resigned as president of Wellesley College's Young Republicans over the Vietnam War, made that vote without even bothering to read the National Intelligence Estimate with its skimpy evidence....

Did you follow that? I'll give you a minute to recover.

Is it fair to attack Clinton for voting to authorize the Iraq War? Sure -- we denied her the Democratic nomination in 2008 largely because of that vote.

And yes, I give Maureen Dowd credit for being an Iraq War skeptic back in 2002.

But her pal Michael Kelly? I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but no one tried harder to cheerlead for that war -- and browbeat its critics -- than Kelly did. On the tenth anniversary of his death, Gawker's Tom Scocca compiled a few choice Kelly quotes:

We are in a position of triumph, and potentially much greater triumph. A few months ago, all was still in tatters. Hussein still defied with impunity, still ruled unchallenged over his torture state, still schemed to advance his dreams of himself as the atomic Saladin... The will of one man, George W. Bush, changed all this.

****

[H]undreds of thousands of marchers -- and many more millions who did not march -- believe quite sincerely that theirs is a profoundly moral cause, and this is really all that motivates them. They believe, as French President Jacques Chirac recently pontificated, that 'war is always the worst answer.'

The people who believe what Chirac at least professes to believe are, in the matter of Iraq, as wrong as it is possible to be. Theirs is not the position of profound morality but one that stands in profound opposition to morality.

****

Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.

...[A]ny rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuqaiti, or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?

Yes, Hillary Clinton's openness to hawkish arguments (a decade ago and now) upsets me. But everyone at her level gets assimilated by the hawkish Borg to some extent -- it happened to President Obama; it's happening right now to Rand Paul (who's can't quite bring himself to denounce the bombing of Iraq). The cultural norms are enforced by people like Michael Kelly. Did he even bother to read the National Intelligence Estimate with its skimpy evidence? Did Dowd ever ask him?

WHAT WERE THE TEABAGGERS REBELLING AGAINST? WHADDAYA GOT?

Megan McArdle argues the tea party movement never would have gotten off the ground if Hillary Clinton had been elected president in 2008:

... I think that Hillary Clinton would have been more cautious when dealing with Republicans, and therefore ultimately more successful in some ways. At the very least, she would not be facing the same level of vehement opposition in Congress.

I think liberals really do not understand emotionally the extent to which the Tea Party was created by the Affordable Care Act and the feeling that its government was simply steamrolling it....

Liberals tend to write off this anger as racism, as irrational hatred of Barack Obama, or as perverse joy in denying health care to the poor, but at its root, it's the simpler feeling that your country is making a mistake and you can't stop it because the people in charge are ignoring the obvious. Yes, a lot of money and energy was poured into the Tea Party by rich backers, but rich backers cannot create a grassroots campaign unless the underlying passion is there in the voters (paging Karl Rove and Crossroads). The Obama administration created that passion with Obamacare.

I think that Hillary Clinton would have pulled back when Rahm Emanuel (or his counterfactual Clinton administration counterpart) told her that this was a political loser and she should drop it....

That’s not to say that Republicans would have somehow been all kissy-kissy with Clinton -- they weren’t very nice to her husband, after all. She would of course still have faced stiff opposition in Congress.... But I doubt she would have had the debt ceiling debacle or the deep gridlock of the last four years, because it was Obamacare that elected a fresh new class of deeply ideological Republicans who thought they were having their own transformative political movement....

That's a load of bollocks.

BooMan thinks it's a load of bollocks because Hillary was unlikely to have shrunk from the fight:

Would Hillary have countenanced losing on health care for a second time when she still had a path to victory?

Did anything she did on the campaign trail in 2008 indicate that she's the kind of woman who folds her tent and gives up when the odds look stacked against her?

There is no question in my mind that Hillary Clinton would done exactly what President Obama did because she would have seen failure on health care as unthinkable so long as it could be avoided.

Maybe she would have pulled back, maybe not. But it doesn't matter, because the tea party wasn't about Obamacare at first.

Remember the "Tax Day Tea Party" demonstrations on April 15, 2009 -- the ones Fox News happily agreed to co-brand?



Let's go to the news coverage of those protests. This is from CNN:

... Financial-industry and automotive bailouts were launched at the end of George W. Bush's presidency, but many demonstrators aimed their words and signs at the Obama administration, criticizing it in part for the recently passed stimulus package.

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill President Obama signed in February "was basically shoved down the throat of the American people," Welsh said.

"Now is not the time to be running a $700 billion dollar plus budget through that people did not talk about, that people did not read," Welsh said....

At one protest Wednesday morning a sign read, "I read as much of the stimulus bill as my Congresswoman."

... Bloggers in Seattle, Washington, were the first to bring conservatives together for a rally on February 16 against what they saw as too many government handouts to banks, the auto and mortgage industries....

The embers turned into a raging fire when later that month, CNBC personality Rick Santelli went off on Obama's policies live on air.

"The government is promoting bad behavior," Santelli said, asking why Obama would make Americans who pay their bills subsidize the mortgages of "losers."

Santelli said he wanted a tea party to happen in Chicago, Illinois, to stand up and angrily demand "No more." ...

The outrage spread....

And this is from The New York Times:

... In Pensacola, Fla., about 500 protesters lined a busy street, some ... carrying signs reading "Got Pork?" and "D.C.: District of Corruption." ...

In downtown Houston, ... American flags abounded, along with hand-painted placards that bore messages like "Abolish the I.R.S.," "Less Government More Free Enterprise," "We Miss Reagan" and "Honk if You Are Upset About Your Tax Dollars Being Spent on Illegal Aliens."

... Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah, a Republican, was booed in Salt Lake City for accepting about $1.5 billion in federal stimulus money, and in Alaska, hundreds of people held signs and chanted "No more spending," The Associated Press reported....

Did the escalating protests come to focus on health care, particularly at congressional town-hall forums in the summer of 2009? Yes -- but that's because Democrats gave angry right-wingers a fat target by holding so many Obamacare-oriented gatherings. The crazies were goaded to anger long before their focus was directed to health care, and they've been angry about plenty of other things since then. Take health care away and you've still got the stimulus and financial bailouts and the auto bailout and immigration and tax policy and "czars" and, later, Benghazi and gun control -- as well as, frankly, the general notion that government should help people in need (which the crazies refer to at all times as "socialism"). The tea party strategy was based on ginning up outrage in general, not specifically about health care. Health care was just a useful peg to hang the rage on.

The only way President Hillary could have avoided Obama's fate would have been by abandoning every promise she ran on and adopting John McCain platform in its entirety -- and even then the rabble and their rousers probably would have made her a target, just out of the need to focus the rage.

So, no, Hillary's loss didn't allow the tea party to go wild. That riot was planned from the start.

FOURNIER LOSES SLEEP OVER THE POSSIBILITY OF A SECOND 9/11

Ron Fournier is having 9/11 nightmares:

... I can't shake another, darker, question. What if we get hit again with a 9/11-sized attack? More to the point, hypothetically, would a crisis pull us together or drive us apart? It's a morbid question worth asking before the worst happens, because there's reason to worry about the durability of what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature."

Republicans get a share of the blame for post-9/11 partisanship in Fournier's telling, though Both Sides Did It, of course:

... Three months after the attacks, Democrats mildly questioned parts of the USA Patriot Act, and Attorney General John Ashcroft said such questions "erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." Time has proved the legislation to be excessive.

Two months later, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle stepped up criticism of Bush's antiterrorism policies. In response, Republican Rep. Tom Davis accused the Democrat of "giving aid and comfort to our enemies." It was the start of a years-long strategy of the Bush administration to stoke and exploit fears of a post-9/11 attack to enhance the president's standing and defang Democrats.

The false front of bipartisanship crumbled in May of 2002 when the bin Laden memo leaked. According to a helpful chronology compiled by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan, Democrats demanded to know what else Bush knew about the attacks beforehand. White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said second-guessing is "exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do."

The pattern was set for the rest of Bush's term. Democrats seized on (and often exaggerated) any morsel of evidence that undermined Bush's tough-on-terrorists image, and the White House seized on (and often exaggerated) any development that underscored its narrative. The Bush team created a new story line by invading Iraq based on evidence of weapons of mass destruction that was distorted, hyped, and, in some cases, contrived....

But Fournier frets that we're so much more partisan now. I'd respond that Republicans were pretty damn partisan during the real 9/11 -- faced with Democratic support for a war against bin Laden, Republicans turned a plan to attack Iraq into a wedge issue for the 2002 midterms, then turned support for a "war president" into a minimal standard for patriotism in 2004.

It's always been easy to imagine that the Republican response to a 9/11 under a Democratic president would be rabid and divisive. But then why didn't Republicans try to turn the Fort Hood shootings or the Boston Marathon bombing into major anti-Obama rallying cries? And yes, the Republicans have been obsessed with Benghazi, but, outside the GOP base, the public has mostly shrugged. Rabid partisanship often doesn't connect.

Of course Republicans would be inclined to attack Obama mercilessly in the aftermath of a second 9/11, but there'd almost certainly be too much unifying sentiment in the media -- teary montages of the victims' lives and all that -- for attacks on Obama to gain much purchase in the immediate aftermath of the event.

And what would the president do? He'd go to war. Are John McCain and Lindsey Graham going to say no to a war? Oh, sure, they'd piss and moan about the inadequacy of the response, but they'd want at least as much war as the president was willing to give them. The alleged anti-interventionists in the GOP would -- as they always do -- fall silent.

The long-term right-wing response would be to put Obama under a permanent cloud of suspicion. There'd be select committees holding contentious hearings and mounting multiple investigations. But Republicans' impulse to crush the president always competes with the impulse to sustain rage against him. Republicans need Obama -- they have no agenda to put forth, so their agenda is "Obama sucks!" I think they'd rather have him around as a target than actually destroy him.

Would they succeed in dividing the country? Well, it's already divided. Obama certainly wouldn't go to 90% approval in an attack's aftermath -- I don't think he would have reached that level even in 2009, when his approval rating was in the 60s -- just because a third of the country will always hate any Democratic president. I think Republicans wouldn't try to remove Obama from office, and then the question would be whether the public believed his response to the attack was what they wanted it to be. Fournier frets that we were "united" right after 9/11 and "divided" later, but what ultimately divided the public was the increasing realization that the Iraq war was fought on false pretenses, combined with the failure to neutralize Osama bin Laden and the inability to bring peace and order to either Afghanistan or Iraq. And even then, it took Katrina and Terri Schiavo and an attempt to privatize Social Security to turn the public fully against Bush. Until then, no matter how much fighting there was in Washington, the public was (too) patient, for years. Bush did win in 2004, despite Abu Ghraib and the Battle of Fallujah and all that.

The aftermath of a second 9/11 would get ugly. But I think America would give Obama some leeway, and compel Republicans to restrain their anti-Obama bloodlust just a bit.

BUT A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT WILL DO WHATEVER THE HELL HE WANTS NO MATTER WHAT

Jonathan Chait thinks that supporters of immigration reform who are rooting for unilateral action from President Obama should be careful what they wish for:

... I fully support Obama's immigration policy goals. But the defenses of Obama's methods seem weak and short-sighted.

To imagine how this method might be dangerous, you have to abstract it away from the specific end it advances and consider another administration using similar methods for policies liberals might not like. What if a Republican president announced that he would stop enforcing the payment of estate taxes? Or suspend enforcement of regulations on industrial pollution? Or laws on workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians?

And that's not going to happen if President Obama backs away now from taking steps on behalf of the undocumented? Of course it's going to happen -- the Republican Party is too radical now, too full of its own revolutionary fervor and its sense that it represents the will of all Real Americans. More to the point, the Republican faithful already believe that Obama has overstepped constitutional boundaries so blatantly that totalitarian dictators and the ghost of Richard Nixon can only gape in awe. The people who aren't considered crazies in the Republican Party -- y'know, like John Boehner, he of the House lawsuit against the president? -- aren't waiting for an immigration executive order to declare Obama an out-of-control tyrant; they call him an out-of-control tyrant now. How can whatever the president is planning have any impact on that belief, given how firmly it's already entrenched?

Did the Bush/Cheney administration wait for an example of alleged overreach by a Democratic president before building Guantanamo and making torture the law of the land? No. Then why would President Christie or Walker or Paul or Ryan or Cruz be constrained by an Obama change of heart on immigration now?

The only reason the next Republican president won't be a law unto himself is that he'll probably have a rubber-stamp Republican Congress to ratify every radical, extreme item on his to-do list in the constitutionally prescribed way. But if Democrats hang on in one house of Congress, the next Republican in the Oval Office will say that nothing he does or seeks to do can compare to what Obama's already done as I write this, mild though it may be in actuality. So screw it, Obama may as well do whatever he's planning.

LINDSEY GRAHAM JUST WANTS TO REMIND EVERYONE WHO THE REAL ENEMY IS

Steve Benen is disgusted by this, understandably:

That Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appeared on a Sunday show to complain about President Obama was not surprising. What was jarring, however, was rhetoric like this.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, sharply criticized the limited scale of President Obama's military response to ISIS on Sunday, and called on the president to be clearer about the threat the militants pose to the United States.

"If he does not go on the offensive against ISIS, ISIL, whatever you guys want to call it, they are coming here," Mr. Graham said on "Fox News Sunday." "This is just not about Baghdad. This is just not about Syria. And if we do get attacked, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages."

... Graham seems to be laying down a marker: if members of the Islamic State, at some point in the future, execute some kind of terror strike on Americans, Lindsey Graham wants us to blame President Obama -- because the president didn't stick to the playbook written by hawks and neocons....

Yup. And here's more:

"They are coming here. It is about our homeland, and if we get attacked because he has no strategy to protect us, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages," Graham said. "I think of an American city in flames because of the terrorists' ability to operate in Syria and Iraq."

At one point, Graham speaks directly to Obama, appealing to him to speak directly to his constituents. "Mr. President, you have never once spoken to the American people about the threat we face," he says. "This commander-in-chief has no strategy. He has no vision."

Notice who all but disappears from this line of argument? Notice whom Senator Graham all but absolves from guilt if an attack happens?

The people actually doing the attacking.

If you doubt me, watch the extended clip:



Whether or not it's realistic to believe that ISIS could attack America in the foreseeable future, Senator Graham, if it happens, wants you to blame President Obama before you blame ISIS -- or perhaps instead of blaming ISIS at all.

But that's no surprise. I've said this on the blog since the Bush years: Republicans despise their domestic political enemies far more than they do any international enemy. Ginning up anger against a foreign enemy used to be an indirect way of rousing the populace against allegedly evil peacenik/appeaser/fifth-columnist Democrats and liberals. But now Republicans barely take the trouble to demonize foreign foes. Those guys are just acting in accordance with their inner nature. It's Obama who has agency, so he's the bad guy who's endeavoring to get us all killed.

I seem to recall that after the last time a foreign foe launched an attack of the kind Senator Graham is envisioning, back in 2001, we were expected to close ranks and rally around the president. I guess those days are gone -- at least until the next time a Republican is in the White House.

IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME LIBERTARIANS AROUND, TO HAVE A MOMENT OR SOMETHING

Hi, it's Steve. I'm back. Great work from Yastreblyansky, Tom, Crank, and Aimai while I was gone -- thanks, folks.

I came home to Robert Draper's ridiculous, credulous New York Times Magazine cover story "Has the 'Libertarian Moment' Finally Arrived?" Tom briefly dealt with the story when it appeared online during the week, but I read it in print -- whn it turned up in a paper in which the lead news item was "Iraq Airstrikes May Continue for Months, Obama Says." That news would seem to offer an excellent opportunity for a movement devoted to small government and a resistance to interventionism, right? So I'm sure Rand Paul, the fervent peacenik, has already stepped up and made himself an anti-war leader -- right? Especially when Hillary Clinton, the Democrat against whom Paul will probably run if he wins the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, is positioning herself to President Obama's right, blaming the rise of ISIS on America's failure to intervene more forcefully in Syria. Perfect opportunity for libertarians to assert themselves -- right?

Well, no. Senator Paul has been attacking Hillary Clinton, but he can't seem to figure out whether he's angry at her from the left or from the right.

Left:

"Hillary's war in Libya, Hillary's war in Syria," he said. "None of this was ever approved by Congress."

Right:

Over the last week, he didn't just blame Hillary Clinton for the current state of Libya, he said she created a "Jihadist wonderland" there. He didn't just knock her for not fortifying the Benghazi embassy, he said she treated the place "as if it were Paris."

Hey, kids -- there's the guy who's supposed to lead your new peace movement! He sounds pretty much like a Republican! Excited?

I also came back to a city that's still feeling tension because police killed an unarmed black man on Staten Island last month by putting him in a chokehold. Eric Garner, overweight and asthmatic, was the focus of the cops' attention because the city is cracking down on people selling loose cigarettes.

Selling loose cigarettes? What could be more of a libertarian issue?

In his Times Magazine cover story, Draper describes a visit to the offices of Reason magazine:

On the afternoon that I showed up to chat with the longtime libertarian writer and editor Nick Gillespie at the posh Washington offices of Reason, just off Dupont Circle, a dozen or so staff members were hanging out in the kitchen, drinking Green Hat gin. (It is named in honor of George Cassiday, a bootlegger who was known as "the man in the green hat" and who provided liquor to congressmen during Prohibition, thus making it a quintessentially libertarian beverage.)

There you have it -- the libbies celebrate a guy who, long ago, sold hooch in defiance of government regulation, but here's a guy killed by the cops for selling unlicensed smokes and they have no interest whatsoever.

Why isn't Rand Paul standing shoulder to shoulder with Al Sharpton in protests of Garner's death? For that matter, why isn't Nick Gillespie there in his damn leather jacket? Libertarians can talk all they want in the abstract about black incarceration rates, and it's sweet of Senator Paul to bring that issue up in front of white crowds. But here's a flesh-and-blood black man who's dead because of law-and-order excesses -- and dead because of alleged entrepreneurialism -- and the libbies are nowhere to be found. They're invisible as they've been invisible throughout the fight over stop-and-frisk (the cops who stop and frisk are looking for guns, so you'd think the libbies would be all over that).

Draper attends a libertarian rally in New Hampshire, where he sees an item with the slogan "I Do Not Consent to Searches." You know who can afford to make that kind of assertion? Someone who has no real fear of ever having to say no to a police search -- a white person, in other words. Libertarians talk tough on this issue, but they have no sympathy for the significant segment of the U.S. population for whom it represents a day-to-day fear, with possible deadly consequences. Stop-and-frisk? "Driving while black"? Libertarians don't care. And I guarantee you libertarians aren't going to express any concern about Michael Brown, an unarmed black eighteen-year-old who was shot to death this weekend in a confrontation with cops in a St. Louis suburb.

Libertarians want to have "a moment"? They want to secure the vote of Millennials, who are skeptical of war and increasingly multi-racial? Maybe they ought to try actually living up to their principles. Maybe they should step up when their principles are violated in the real world. When they fail to do so, we naturally assume that those principles are a sham, and all they really care about is getting high legally without paying taxes.

Landmarks in strategeric thinking

Any doubts about the return of the US warplanes to Iraq in the defense of Erbil (and its US consulate) against the troops of the self-denominated Caliph of not-Baghdad ought to be resolved by the speed with which those doughty senators, McCain and Graham, came out to condemn it on Thursday:

"We need a strategic approach, not just a humanitarian one....

"It should include U.S. air strikes against ISIS leaders, forces, and positions both in Iraq and Syria. It should include support to Sunni Iraqis who seek to resist ISIS. And none of this should be contingent on the formation of a new government in Baghdad." 

If by "strategic" you mean an approach that violates every principle of strategy or strategery, then no doubt.

By other criteria, strategic is what the Obama administration is doing, as a coolly reasoned examination by Professor Cole shows: it's not just to protect the consulate and prevent a "Benghazi", but

The US is intervening for political as well as military reasons. Washington says that more such military aid may be forthcoming if Iraq will form a government of national unity. So basically, Obama is putting pressure on President Fuad Massoum to pick a prime minister other than Nouri al-Maliki and form a government asap. Likewise, Washington wants the Kurds to remain within a Federal Iraqi framework rather than declaring independence, and seems to be bombing IS positions for the Kurds in order to extract a promise from Kurdistan president Massoud Barzani that he will stay in Iraq.

Or rather providing cover for the US to continue refusing to intervene when Massoum fails to work out a government of national unity, since he certainly will fail, and keeping Kurdistan nominally in Iraq all the same. The other thing is that the Peshmerga are the only force in Iraq (as opposed to Turkey or Iran) capable of inflicting damage on the army of the self-denominated Caliphate, and inflicting damage on the Caliphate (which itself controls only about 8,000 committed fighters) is encouraging its nervous and not very willing allies, Sunni but not that Sunni, to abandon it, as Cole says the Sufi Naqshbandi are now doing (while the Baath Party is denying it has any connection with the Islamic State).

Because the way to defeat the Islamic State is not to defeat it but to break it up.

Also, American air power didn't just feed or attempt to feed the desperate Yazidi trapped on Sinjar Mountain; the strikes opened up the road for Peshmerga troops to rescue them, in operations that are now ongoing, not merely humanitarian but also strategic in the development of another front of interethnic tolerance.

In this connection I was very reassured by a couple of things Obama said in his interview with Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mystax Mysterii of the Times.

In particular, he recognizes quite clearly that there can't be a "victory" in Iraq and Syria unless it doesn't involve US troops:

The fact is, said the president, in Iraq a residual U.S. troop presence would never have been needed had the Shiite majority there not “squandered an opportunity” to share power with Sunnis and Kurds. “Had the Shia majority seized the opportunity to reach out to the Sunnis and the Kurds in a more effective way, [and not] passed legislation like de-Baathification,” no outside troops would have been necessary. Absent their will to do that, our troops sooner or later would have been caught in the crossfire, he argued.

And he has a willingness to learn from mistakes (though he can't quite bring himself to call them mistakes) unlike anything I've ever seen in a national-level politician: from

“...our participation in the coalition that overthrew Qaddafi in Libya. I absolutely believed that it was the right thing to do. ... Had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria. ... And so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction. But what is also true is that I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this. Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions. ... So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?’ ”

Though it may not be getting him to the best conclusions (I'd like to think perhaps he can contemplate the helpfulness of a "much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies" only because he knows there was never going to be such an effort from the NATO allies or the US itself, or at least had something more peaceful in mind than it sounds like).

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Ignosce te ipsum

Shorter David Brooks, "Introspective or narcissistic?" New York Times, August 8, 2014:

Your self-worth and identity are at stake in every judgment you make about yourself. Therefore you shouldn't make any judgments about yourself, or if you must, do it in the third person, so you can tell yourself it isn't about you. I often use a pseudonym for this purpose, like "C.S. Lewis" or "George Marshall".

I think we can now conjecture

1. that the topic of the book Brooks didn't write last fall was the dangereux voisinage of self-knowledge to narcissism in what he regards as an increasingly self-regarding culture, and
2. sometime during its non-composition the now former Mrs. Brooks shouted, "Ha, you want to write a book about self-knowledge? You have the self-knowledge of a fire hydrant!"

Hence the flurry of columns starting in February inveighing against knowing thyself, and the remarkable storm of references in Friday's episode—I count citations of seven names ranging from Immanuel Kant to self-control mavens Özlem Ayduk and Ethan Kross and one psychological acronym—suggesting either that he has put in an uncharacteristically large amount of homework for this piece or has been saving stuff up.

Chuck Close at work in 2004-05.

Think of one of those Chuck Close self-portraits. The face takes up the entire image. You can see every pore. Some people try to introspect like that. But others see themselves in broader landscapes, in the context of longer narratives about forgiveness, or redemption or setback and ascent. 

If by "pore" you mean "tiny rectangular abstract image which resolves itself, seen at an adequate distance, into part of a human face". Otherwise, no, from the first photographs of 1967-68 to his most recent work, not a pore to be seen [That's a bit of an exaggeration, see tgchicago in comments—Y.]. Close's work is entirely about distance and context. It's as if Brooks saw one from 40 or 50 feet away and recoiled in disgust and anxiety, refusing to get any nearer.

Why the subject of self-examination fills him with such fascination and dread is a matter he might want to investigate himself, perhaps with the assistance of a therapist, if he weren't so deeply opposed to it.

Update:

Driftglass is in magical form.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Shorter Village Voice Blogger: "Shut Up, Liberals!"

Andrew W.K., who is apparently some kind of advice columnist for the Village Voice, gets a letter from someone whose father is a right-wing asshole:

I'm writing because I just can't deal with my father anymore. He's a 65-year-old super right-wing conservative who has basically turned into a total asshole intent on ruining our relationship and our planet with his politics. I'm more or less a liberal democrat with very progressive values and I know that people like my dad are going to destroy us all. I don't have any good times with him anymore. All we do is argue. When I try to spend time with him without talking politics or discussing any current events, there's still an underlying tension that makes it really uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong, I love him no matter what, but how do I explain to him that his politics are turning him into a monster, destroying the environment, and pushing away the people who care about him?

And the advice he gets is spectacularly useless:

Go back and read the opening sentences of your letter. Read them again. Then read the rest of your letter. Then read it again. Try to find a single instance where you referred to your dad as a human being, a person, or a man. There isn't one. You've reduced your father -- the person who created you -- to a set of beliefs and political views and how it relates to you....

The world isn't being destroyed by democrats or republicans, red or blue, liberal or conservative, religious or atheist -- the world is being destroyed by one side believing the other side is destroying the world. The world is being hurt and damaged by one group of people believing they're truly better people than the others who think differently....

When we lump people into groups, quickly label them, and assume we know everything about them and their life based on a perceived world view, how they look, where they come from, etc., we are not behaving as full human beings. When we truly believe that some people are monsters, that they fundamentally are less human than we are, and that they deserve to have less than we do, we ourselves become the monsters....

Have the strength to doubt and question what you believe as easily as you're so quick to doubt his beliefs. Live with a truly open mind -- the kind of open mind that even questions the idea of an open mind. Don't feel the need to always pick a side. And if you do pick a side, pick the side of love. It remains our only real hope for survival and has more power to save us than any other belief we could ever cling to....

That's a radically truncated version--the whole thing goes on for 8 long paragraphs (1,074 words) of similarly insipid blather.

Now, in a purely abstract sense, the advice here is largely unobjectionable. Open mind: good. Love: good. (And yes, the letter-writer is prone to overstatement: "destroy us all" is kind of a dumb way to phrase it, for example.)

The problem is, it doesn't apply to practical realities and it doesn't address the letter-writer's problem.

Andrew W.K. is operating on the assumption that the father is calmly and rationally elucidating his policy opinions to his son, and the son's reaction is purely intolerance of those opinions. Does anyone here think that's really the case?

I didn't think so.

What the son is talking about--what has become epidemic in the Fox/Drudge/Breitbart era--is (right-wing) political opinions as acts of aggression. You can't judge a liberal son's "intolerance" for his father's opinion without understanding that the father's opinion (there's really only one) is liberalism must be destroyed. That's the context that flies right over Andrew Fucking W.K.'s pointy little head. So of course he chastises the son for his "intolerance".

How fucking useless is this advice? Useless enough to get approving links from Hot Air and the Daily Caller.

I don't know the answer to the son's problem. I'm not sure how I'll handle it in a few weeks when I go backpacking with my right-wing son. But I sure as hell know that the way to handle it isn't to pretend that the dad doesn't have a problem. As if the dad isn't "pushing away the people who care about him" by aggressively expressing his contempt for everything they believe. This is a pathology, and pretending it doesn't exist is a good way to make sure it's never cured.

A gun that it’s pointless for bad guys to steal from good guys to use on innocent people? Or that keeps toddlers from killing infants? This must be stopped!

From The Washington Post comes news of a new “smart gun” that shoots killer bullets, same as ordinary pistols, but that is all but useless in the hands of anyone who might try to steal one for nefarious purposes. For that matter it’s also nearly harmless in the hands of toddlers who play with a parent’s gun and by accident off a young sibling.

The three year old who fiddles with Dad’s gun and accidentally shoots her little brother? Won’t likely happen with the Armatix iP1, as the new smart weapon is called.

Nor will a dead toddler case like this happen. Or like this one. Or like a whole bunch of cases that seem to occur with alarming regularity in our life-cherishing nation.

The reason? The new Armatix smart gun “can be personalized so it only fires if the gun’s rightful owner is wearing a special watch connected wirelessly to the weapon,” reports the Washington Post.

The gun lobby folks are fuming. Gunsmoke is coming out of their ears. They’re frothing at the mouth like rabid dogs. It’s a wonder their heads don’t explode! The nerve – the unmitigated, unpatriotic, un-American (well, the gun was invented in Germany), and maybe even un-Constitutional nerve of the  furriner who’s peddling that subversive piece of evil.

Little wonder the Gun Nuts of America, or whatever they’re called, organized an enraged boycott of a gun store that dared to offer the weapon for sale.

Little wonder, in fact, that they didn’t converge on the store with pitchforks raised and guns blazing, and blow the place to kingdom come. (Well, since the store backed off and decided to stop selling the gun after all, I guess the gun crazies won’t have to shoot the proprietor and clerks to death this time.)

Also little wonder, the news has resulted in thoughtful, logical, completely balanced expressions of alarm about the gun’s inventor, Eric Mauch and his evil weapon, which was no doubt ejaculated by Satan during perverted sex with a liberal.

“I love Ernst, and his contributions to firearms are incredible,” said Jim Schatz, a gun industry consultant who worked for Mauch at Heckler & Koch. “But he doesn’t understand that the anti-gunners will use this to infringe on a constitutional right. They don’t have a Second Amendment in Germany.”

I mean yeah, I know this thought is getting old already, but while right wing folks want to preserve fetuses in the womb, once they’re born – hell, they should enjoy the God-given right to get blasted into smithereens by their siblings, because The Sacred Right To Bear Arms, and of course, also because Freedom.

Cross-posted at The New York Crank

Extremely Short Answers to Incredibly Stupid Questions

No.

Next question?

Update: added link to Jonathan Chait's snarky but substantive takedown.

Some of My Best Fr...um...

Richmond, CA Councilman Corky Boozé, who has been instigating anti-gay harassment of Richmond's openly lesbian Vice Mayor at City Council meetings, quoted in the Chronicle:

I'm not homophobic - my ex-wife is a lesbian.

And yes, that's a straight line in more ways than one.

Mister Brooks—He delusional

Dear Mister Nice Blog community: At my place I almost invariably do a response to every Tuesday and Friday David Brooks column in the Times, a full-on parody, an analysis, a source study, or a Shorter; Brooks is practically my raisin of être, if you know what I mean (it means "grape of wrath", I believe). They don't really belong here, and today's effort isn't an especially good one, but since none of the gang has posted anything today, here goes:

Mombasa skyline, via Kenyans.org.

Dog whistles are everywhere these days, and if you listen close enough you might hear one that's meant for you, as when David Brooks lets liberals know that he's not opposed to this week's White House Africa summit, though taking care to leave it to the end of the piece, as if he'd just happened to think of it in the course of writing his big Africa column of the year and didn't want to leave it out altogether, and then sealing it with a dis (because it's not really a Brooks column without a dash of gratuitous spite):

President Obama is holding a summit meeting of African leaders in Washington this week. But U.S. influence on the continent is now pathetically small compared with the Chinese and Europeans. The joke among the attendees is that China invests money; America holds receptions.

I can't find a source for that joke, and suspect he made it up.

I'm pretty sure Brooks's ideas on Africa were largely formed in August 2011, when he went with the family on a safari trip to Kenya and Tanzania, getting three columns out of it at the time, when he interviewed (8/19) post-paleoanthropological jewelry entrepreneur Philip Leakey; (8/23) rugged altruists Blair Miller, Rye Barcott, Stephen Letchford, and Susan and Leland Albright; and (8/30) the nameless staff. Yes, the names of those who had one had something in common.

He may, however, have made contact with the owner of a partially non–Anglo-Saxon name, CEO James Mwangi of Equity Bank, because when a September 2012 profile of Mwangi appeared in African Business Magazine (out of London), a publication it is hard to imagine Brooks picking up off the side table at the Young Fogeys' Club (or Young Fogies' Club, as Mr. Pierce prefers to spell it), he read it, clipped it, and slipped it into his Rainy Day Column Prompts file under "Africa", from which it emerged to form about half of the current column.

It's not a bad story, though obviously better in the original than the undertold Brooks redaction, and I think I prefer the slightly drier but still sparkly version in The Economist:

Off-Script, But Hardly Alone

Shorter Rick Moran: What Mo Brooks said was bad form, but it was kind of right:

I’m not sure the comment is “out there” at all. The exaggeration comes when trying to describe the Democrats’ identity politics: slice and dice the electorate into nice, neat little boxes and target them with ads and talking points demonizing Republicans for each group. Blacks are told the GOP wants to return to the days of Jim Crow. Hispanics, that Republicans want to deport them even if they’re legal. Single women, that the GOP wants to take away their birth control pills and make life miserable for them. Even if those specific charges aren’t used by Democrats, they are broadly hinted at....

Rep. Brooks is mostly correct in his analysis of the immigration issue...But he exaggerates when he says Democrats claim all whites hate everyone else....

The irony is that Brooks will be vilified for racially dividing America when it’s the Democrats whose deliberate political strategy of cleaving the electorate by skin color has done more to damage and divide America than anything this back bench Republican could ever do.

Of course Moran can't credibly repudiate Brooks. Brooks is just another Monster from the (Republican) Id, saying exactly what they all think but most know they aren't supposed to say. Republicans are like OJ, always searching for the real racists. And they always find them not in the de facto single-race party, but in the party that enjoys broad support across all racial and ethnic groups.

When your whole worldview is predicated on your own race/gender/orientation being the default, being normal, of course you end up thinking inclusiveness is divisiveness. And every now and then, like Mo Brooks, you end up saying it.

War aims

Photo from Electronic Intifada via Tom Pride.

First Israel was fighting to rescue the kidnapped Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel, although they knew the boys were already dead, then to punish the Hamas organization for killing them, though they knew the organization hadn't done it.

Then Israel was fighting to stop firing of thousands of Hamas rockets (which set a kind of record by not even slightly harming a single person during the whole month of attacks), only they didn't know (contrary to their claims) where the rockets were. But they could find some of the tunnels Palestinians had built out of their prison camp to attack their guards on the other side of the border, so they fought to destroy those.

That one stuck, with a brief interlude in which they were fighting to rescue the "kidnapped" Lt. Hadar Goldin, although they knew he was dead and the IDF itself may indeed have killed him in keeping with the so-called "Hannibal directive". But destroying the tunnels proved to be the best of the ex post facto war aims after all, so that now Gazans are to be allowed to have some peace for three days, maybe for another couple of years, for which everybody needs to be grateful.

The only true possibility of peace remains what Yitzhak Rabin called the Peace of the Brave, in which Israelis accept that there is a certain amount of ineluctable risk. There is a risk that some Israelis will be hurt if there is peace; if Gazans are permitted to travel in and out of the territory, or if Palestinians in general are permitted to constitute themselves as a state.

Then again some Israelis will certainly be hurt if there is no peace (64 IDF soldiers in the course of the current adventure dead, for what?). The Israeli government seems to have adopted Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" in which if there's a one-percent chance that something dreadful will happen you must act, but if there's a 90% certainty (e.g. that America's coastal cities will be drowned over the next century by the ongoing rise in the sea level) you can ignore that. It's the War of the Hysterically Frightened.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

HSBC, crooked doings, and the self-pity of psychopaths

Google “Sociopath + self-pity” and you’ll get in excess of 39,000 hits. It turns out that sociopaths – people who lack empathy for the pain and suffering they inflict on others – are pretty sensitive and self-serving when it comes to pain that others inflict on them.

Which brings us to HSBC, the big international bank.

Reuters this morning reports that HSBC’s chairman, Douglas Flint, is bleating pitifully about the pain he and his fellow bankers at HSBC are currently feeling.

The bank, uh, “warned” “that a growing body of international regulations was putting its staff under unprecedented pressure and discouraging them from taking risks,” according to Reuters. The report goes on to say Flint whines that the poor banking staff is “fearful of retribution.” 

O, the pitiful buggers! This is the same bank that according to another Reuters story, paid a $10 million settlement “ to settle U.S. government charges that it defrauded taxpayers by submitting inflated bills to process residential foreclosures.”

It’s the same bank that a Mexican drug lord – you know, Mexico, where the drug lords decapitate people they don’t approve of and leave headless bodies in the street? – a Mexican drug lord endorses HSBC as “the place to launder money.”

In fact, it’s the same bank that pisses off its own shareholders (Disclosure: I'm one of those shareholders) by paying fat bonuses for failure that costs the shareholders money. “More than a fifth of HSBC's shareholders opposed the bank's pay policy on Friday in the latest show of anger that banks have not reined in bonuses enough in the wake of the financial crisis,” Reuters reported back in May.

And the bankers are now outraged that government regulation is making them fearful? They ought to be grateful – grateful that they’re not doing time.

Cross-posted at The New York Crank

Really, Obama...Really?

Via Atrios and the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — An Obama administration program secretly dispatched young Latin Americans to Cuba using the cover of health and civic programs to provoke political change, a clandestine operation that put those foreigners in danger even after a U.S. contractor was hauled away to a Cuban jail.
Beginning as early as October 2009, a project overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to Cuba in hopes of ginning up rebellion. The travelers worked undercover, often posing as tourists, and traveled around the island scouting for people they could turn into political activists.
In one case, the workers formed an HIV-prevention workshop that memos called "the perfect excuse" for the program's political goals — a gambit that could undermine America's efforts to improve health globally.
But their efforts were fraught with incompetence and risk, an Associated Press investigation found: Cuban authorities questioned who was bankrolling the travelers. The young workers nearly blew their mission to "identify potential social-change actors." One said he got a paltry, 30-minute seminar on how to evade Cuban intelligence, and there appeared to be no safety net for the inexperienced workers if they were caught.

Of course the usual suspects were involved:

In response to the AP's report, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said USAID's programs were important for human rights in Cuba. "We must continue to pressure the Castro regime and support the Cuban people, who are oppressed on a daily basis," said Ros-Lehtinen, a Cuban native and vocal supporter of pro-democracy programs there. 

Which brings me around more sympathetically to this link to "Down With Tyranny" posted by Ifthethunderdontgettya over in comments at Alicublog:

We've made the case that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has, over the last decade, moved-- at times openly and at times stealthily-- to offer political protection to her old comrade, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Back in 2008, when Wasserman Schultz was in charge of the DCCC's Red-to-Blue program and publicly endorsing Ros-Lehtinen (and two other Miami-Dade Republicans) against Democrats, Ileana's 18th CD had a PVI of R+4. Since they, Florida has undergone some significant changes demographically (which we'll get to in a moment) and also in terms of cartology. FL-18 was redrawn into FL-27, a district evenly divided, registration-wise, between Democrats and Republicans. The last reported PVI was R+2 but by now the district is either even or D+1. In 2008 Obama lost the district (the current boundary lines) to McCain 123,543 (51%) but in 2012 won it against Romney 130,020 (53%) to 114,096 (47%). - See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/06/steve-israels-greatest-accomplishment.html#sthash.jMmSXaZs.dpuf

It would be interesting to learn what, if any, backroom deals have been made between the Cuban and Democratic factions that enable them to run in tandem rather than in opposition.  Whatever the exchange, of course, this criminally stupid program is an utter blot on the Obama administration, USAID (if it were possible for it to be any blottier) and everyone who knew about it.

Got paranoia?

Two updates below!

Salvador Dali, Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937.

So Israeli spies have been listening to Secretary Kerry's telephone calls made on unencrypted phone systems over the past year as he tried to negotiate a deal between Israel and Palestine, along with "at least one other secret service", but you can't find out whose, according to Le Nouvel Observateur:

un autre service de renseignement d’un pays non identifié a lui aussi écouté les communications du chef de la diplomatie américaine lorsqu’il utilisait un téléphone portable non sécurisé au lieu des systèmes cryptés, ce qui lui est arrivé plus d’une fois.

(I assume they looked behind Spiegel's subscription wall to make sure, as I was unwilling to do.)

Well, I'm willing to hazard a guess on the identity of that secret service, too contrarian for Slate, too paranoid for the Firebaggers, and too baroque for anybody but the late Norman Mailer, who might well have written it, and its initials are C.I.A., at war with the Obama administration since January 2009. I'm not even kidding. [8/4/14: It looks like speculation on CIA spying on Kerry is false. See below. Y]

Here were Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane a little before the inauguration:

For two years on the presidential campaign trail, Barack Obama rallied crowds with strongly worded critiques of the Bush administration’s most controversial counterterrorism programs, from hiding terrorism suspects in secret Central Intelligence Agency jails to questioning them with methods he denounced as torture.

Now Mr. Obama must take charge of the C.I.A., in what is already proving to be one of the more treacherous patches of his transition to the White House.

But folks preferred to focus on Obama's people rather than his program, and his chosen vehicle for reforming the Agency, the unlovely figure of John O. Brennan, a 25-year veteran who had taken the revolving door out in 2005 and then gave PBS an interview in which he failed to use the word "torture" in (sort of) condemning it:

There was a real debate within the agency, including today, about what are the minimum standards that you want to stoop to and beyond where you're not going to go, because we don't want to stoop to using the same types of standards that terrorists use. We are in this business, whether it be intelligence or the government, to protect freedom, democracy and liberty, not to violate that.

When it comes to individuals who are determined to destroy our nation, though, we have to make sure that we take every possible measure. It's a tough ethical question, and it's a question that really needs to be aired more publicly. The issue of the reported domestic spying -- these are very healthy debates that need to take place. They can't be stifled....

Hopefully, that "dark side" is not going to be something that's going to forever tarnish the image of the United States abroad and that we're going to look back on this time and regret some of the things that we did, because it is not in keeping with our values.

The grammar of that last bit is pretty tortured, speaking of torture, but I think he meant that we would in fact regret, not that he hoped we wouldn't. That would be in keeping with his next big move, to join Obama as an advisor to the Democratic candidate who was touring the country denouncing Bush-administration counterterrorism abuses (and how many of the candidates were doing that? none of the ones named Hillary Clinton, anyhow); and with his subsequent (self-serving bureaucrat's) complaints, after he was forced to withdraw from contending for the DCI post, about how the Bush administration passed him over for promotion because of his excessively humanitarian views:

Standing Athwart History, Whining 'Make it Stop!'

Those of you who have better things to do may have missed, a couple of weeks ago, one of the greatest assaults on human liberty since the dawn of mankind. I am referring, of course, to The Day Josh Barro Imposed His Totalitarian Dictatorship on the World.

Anti-LGBT attitudes are terrible for people in all sorts of communities. They linger and oppress, and we need to stamp them out, ruthlessly.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 24, 2014

In the least surprising plot development ever, Erick Erickson threw a hissy fit ("Certainly I’d like to think Barro doesn’t have extermination of the religious at mind", which is awfully generous of him, don't you think?), in response to which Barro disappointed us all by totally wussing out on the whole killing homophobes thing.

Dude @ewerickson I'm saying we should make anti-LGBT views shameful like segregation. Not saying we should off people http://t.co/aWJtSVI8XC

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 24, 2014

But even this mild suggestion was way too much for the folks at the National Review. Because apparently it's too late--Barro has already killed a bunch of people, or at least tried to:

Consider the real-world actions against the Family Research Council (FRC), when a shooter in 2012 broke into its building with the intent of murdering staffers. How did this come about? The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labeled FRC a “hate group.” The shooter, who wounded and would have killed a brave security guard, confessed that he was influenced by the materials posted on the SPLC’s website. Similarly, Barro’s words give license to those who would seek to disparage people with traditional beliefs about sexuality. Even if Barro doesn’t actually want violence to occur, his rhetoric could help incite it.

Of course, you'll have noticed that in trying to score a cheap point against the SPLC the authors embrace the idea that speech can lead to violence--in other words, the underlying rationale for stigmatizing anti-gay speech. (It has probably also occurred to you that if the SPLC has blood on its hands, the FRC has a whole lot more.) But of course people who notice things like that don't end up writing for the National Review. But the hypothetical blood that might someday be on Josh Barro's figurative hands is a secondary issue. Really, it's all about freedom.

Barro’s sexual fundamentalism wants any dissent marginalized and he’s not reluctant to admit that. This attitude, which is emblematic of the increasing intolerance in many sectors of culture towards those with traditional beliefs about sexuality, penalizes citizens for their beliefs. What we see playing out, once more, is that for liberalism to take root, it must take root by authoritarian impulse where the lies of the sexual revolution, to be cemented, must be enforced through acts of social and legal coercion....

In these tweets, Barro has shared his honest opinion: that the New Sexual Moralism will tolerate no dissent....When it comes to promoting gay rights, all must come to heel. There will be no debate. There will be no room for disagreement. To disagree, in fact, is to “linger and oppress” and cannot be allowed.

American public discourse rests on a fragile foundation that requires living amongst those who disagree with us. It’s called pluralism. This is part of what has made this country so unusual over the centuries: Even in the face of heated debate, we grant one another respect....

You might be tempted to observe that amidst all the hand-waving, what they're really talking about is the right to say bigoted things without being considered a bigot. I, however, choose to take a more generous view. I commend them for their principled stand in favor of diversity of opinion and the free exchange of ideas....

....um, never mind.

(And yes, as far as I can tell, they did this with every dissenting comment--including my own, which was tactless enough to refer to the National Review's historical support for segregation.)

Here, by the way, is a comment that was apparently considered unobjectionable:

If people like Josh Barro are allowed to stigmatize comments like these, the terrorists win.

Et tu, Wonk?

Headline at Heritage's Daily Signal:

Aetna CEO Admits Obamacare Customer Numbers Worse Than Expected

Paragraph to which the headline refers:

Bertolini said the initial Obamacare enrollment numbers were worse than expected but younger enrollees increased in April in May, when Aetna picked up two-thirds of its customer growth through Obamacare.

I.e., the headline should have read "Aetna CEO Admits Obamacare Customer Numbers Worse Than Expected Until They Got Better".

Another headline at the same site announces:

Support for Obamacare Decreases

on the basis of the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, which indeed found a very startling uptick in disapproval of the ACA from June (45%) to July (53%, almost all taken from the Don't Knows; the Approves dropped just from 39% to 37%). What they don't tell you was that large majorities of Democrats, independents, and the public as a whole think whatever it is they don't like can and should be fixed: repeal is less popular than the ACA itself:

The reason Heritage publishes these easily detectable lies-by-omission is pretty clear, I think. It's for inside-the-bubble consumption by their trembling, lip-biting fans, and not to inform anybody but to prompt the writing of checks. They know they won't get called on it by anybody who can hurt them.

What's harder to understand is why Jason Millman of the Washington Post's Wonkblog would be writing virtually the same story, with the headline

Suddenly, Obamacare is more unpopular than ever

This one is a bit more honest than the Heritage treatment; Millman acknowledges toward the end that the uptick in ACA unfavorables is statistically odd and could be noise, and mentions those improve-it-don't-repeal it numbers in his last graf. But the facts aren't reflected in his lede.

Then the editors follow up with a video promoting the traveling Koch Brothers anti-Obamacare carnival (the carnival Steve M was talking about the other day, comparing it to one of those Halloween Hell Houses) with the Proctologist Uncle Sam and so on, and without mentioning the Kochs, either. So really, it's propaganda—what's up with that? Is it Ezra Klein's fault for abandoning them before they were ready to survive on their own?

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Civil Liberties Watch

Woke up this morning hearing a debate from that silly NPR series on the resolution that

INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO UNLIMITED SPENDING ON THEIR OWN POLITICAL SPEECH

which I thought should be pretty interesting as not a boring old Republican vs. Democrat issue but one in which progressives are aligned on both sides, the ACLU itself notoriously having come down on the side of Citizens United. Sadly, it was not; the most interesting thing was former ACLU head Nadine Strossen arguing, for the proposition, that there are cases when it is legitimate to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater—like when there is actually a fire.

No! No! No! That is the worst time to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. If you become aware that a crowded theater is on fire, you should quietly let the management know so that everybody can be safely evacuated. Yelling "Fire!" is the way to start a panic and jam the exits and you will all die.

The worst was that my candidate for New York governor, Zephyr Teachout, arguing against the proposition, didn't call her on it. Come on, Zephyr, you can do better than that.

Lois Lane setting a terrible example.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

So I'm going to be away for a week or so, Guest bloggers will be here while I'm away, though, so keep checking in. I'll be back on August 11.

RIGHT-WING DREAMBOAT PICKS KEN LAY PAL TO RUN POSSIBLE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

One of Wingnuttia's dream candidates for president might be making his move:

Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon turned conservative sensation, is taking a major step toward a 2016 presidential bid by forming a political action committee and selecting the man who would run his campaign, The Washington Times has learned.

Emerging from two-days of meetings with supporters in Palm Beach, Fla., Dr. Carson told the Times on Friday morning he has selected Houston businessman Terry Giles to be his 2016 campaign chairman should he run and approved the formation of a PAC called One Nation....

Asked about the likelihood he will run for president in 2016, Dr. Carson said: "I would say we are definitely a step or two closer that we were a year ago." ...

Giles was described by CNN's Larry King as a "close family friend of the Lays [and the] trustee of Ken Lay's legal trust." More on him:

Giles has quite a background. Early on, he was a criminal defense attorney who handled high-profile cases, such as the Hillside Strangler. He became disillusioned as a criminal defense lawyer, and he focused on civil cases and family relationships. Among his clients: comedian Richard Pryor, former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, and late TV personality Anna Nicole Smith.

He also is a close associate of Werner Erhard, the founder of EST, serving as board chairman of Erhard's successor organization -- Landmark Education.

But why should anybody care? Well, because wingnuts love Ben Carson. A couple of weeks ago, he won the presidential straw poll of the Western Conservative Summit; before that, he nearly won the Republican Leadership Conference straw poll, losing to Ted Cruz, 30 to 29%. (Rand Paul was a distant third at 10%; the rest of the field scored in single digits.) I've already seen a couple of "Ben Carson for President" bumper stickers, including one in a rural, 99.99%-white part of upstate New York. He's had two #1 New York Times bestsellers, and the Draft Ben Carson for President Committee has been surprisingly well funded. Carson may be the sort of longshot eccentric who generates excitement and then crashes and burns -- you know, the next Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann -- but I guarantee you that if he runs he'll top the entire field in at least one poll, and he'll help force all the "establishment" candidates even further to the right than they'd normally be.

I really, really want him to run, and I'll be beside myself with glee if he somehow makes it onto the GOP ticket, because he's incredibly divisive -- a young-earth creationist who compares Obamacare to slavery and gay marriage to bestiality, a guy whose says liberals are

the most racist people there are. Because you know, they put you in a little category, a little box, "you have to think this way, how could you dare come off the plantation?"

All of which means he could probably finish in the top tier in the Iowa caucuses. I can't wait.

NOONAN: YOUR MISSING LIMB IS AN ABSTRACTION, SOLDIER

The subject of Peggy Noonan's hand-wringing today is the increase in America's political polarization. Why are we more divided now? Noonan has a theory -- and it's a crock:

My concern the past few decades has been that we've lost or are losing some of that give, that divisions are sharper and deeper now in part because many of the issues that separate us are so piercing and personal. Vietnam and Watergate were outer issues. Many questions now speak of our essence as human beings. For instance: In the area of what are called the social issues, there are those (I am one) who passionately believe there must be some limits on what is legal, that horrors such as those that occurred in the office of Kermit Gosnell remind us that at the very least babies viable or arguably viable outside the womb must be protected. They can't just be eliminated; if that is allowed we have entered a new stage of barbarism, and the special power of barbarism is that once unleashed it brings more barbarism. A worldview away—a universe away—are those who earnestly insist that any limit on a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy constitutes an illegitimate restriction on the essential rights of all women—that abortion is a personal concern, not a societal one.

So, to boil all this verbiage down: We're more divided now than we were forty years ago because the burning issues of the day are visceral -- abortion, for instance -- whereas, four decades ago, we were merely arguing over the likes of Vietnam and Watergate, which were "outer issues."

For the moment, let's ignore the fact that we were also arguing over abortion forty years ago. And let's ignore the usual Peggy Noonan solipsism (Everyone in America is obsessed with the same issue I am!)

Think about what Noonan is saying -- yes, she's right that Watergate didn't affect most Americans personally on a gut level. But Vietnam? Seriously? Abortion involves blood and guts -- but war doesn't?

We lost 50,000 troops in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died. Limbs were lost, faces were disfigured, emotional compasses were permanently shattered. War is hell, Peggy. It's an "outer issue"? Yes, it was to you and most of your Georgetown friends, because few of them had (literally) any skin in the game.

****

Then again, I don't believe abortion is anything more to Noonan than an abstraction. She wants us to believe that she weeps for the "babies," but what's important to her is the belief that God and the conservative movement will put a gold star on her forehead because of her piety about the "babies." Yes, I believe her feelings on this subject run deep -- but what they touch is a deep, profound wish to be regarded as morally superior. Her God and her movement hand out gold stars to people who despise abortion, but they don't hand out gold stars to people who despise war. So she doesn't care about war.

Here's a song for Noonan:




(Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.)